novelist

My debut novel, Child of Fire, was named to Publishers Weekly's Best 100 Books of 2009, and the two that followed received starred reviews. My epic fantasy trilogy The Great Way was crowdfunded and, at the time, was the ninth-most funded Fiction Kickstarter ever.

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Even more hypothetical

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You are contacted by an old friend who invites you to a gettogether. After hanging for a while, the friend wants to show you something really cool. He leads you to the secret lab where he works and uses his security pass to get you in after hours.

There he shows you a special device. It can send a message back in time to one of four days, New Years Day in 1950, 1960, 1970 or 1980. The message will be received by a machine which will print it out on a postcard, stamp it, and then drop it into a chute to an outgoing mailbox.

Your friend offers you the chance to send a message, but it can’t be longer than a tweet: 140 characters. You can send it to any of those dates and it will be mailed to the person of your choosing (the address is handled separately from the tweet and will not affect the length of the msg you can send, but it also can not contain non-address information or the postcard will not be stamped and mailed, just discarded. Also, you can only do one for technical reasons he can’t explain. Your friend also tells you to keep in mind that most of the messages sent so far have been discarded by the recipients for various reasons.

Do you send a tweet? Who do you send it to, and when? What steps do you take to ensure it won’t be laughed off or ignored?

As I said on your LJ, I wouldn’t send anything; even the most recent date has almost infinite potential for destructive ripple effects (not the least being what it could do to prevent my meeting and marrying Kathleen).

If I DID send something back to 1980, it’s easy to prove my bona fides:
“From Ryk in 2011: May 18th 1980 8:32:17 BOOM! Invest Microsoft, Apple. 1990 invest Wizards of the Coast, 1000:1 in a few years (Richard Garfield, Magic:the Gathering)”

However, doing that could change so many things that I would never actually send the message.